44mm ebay wastegate writeup

[cjridert1]

I'm doing to do a 'budget' drag build - I'm swapping to a twin scroll this season and needed 2 44mm gates. I couldn't see spending $700+ on a set of tials, but also didn't want to spend $150 and end up with glorified paperweights. I looked all over for writeups on these and at most found "yea, it seems fine" writeups. I ended up going with the latter. I spent $160 on these guys shipped to the house. These are the "44mm high quality wastegate" items on ebay. They are sold by the seller "wyntonm" and dont appear to be available any longer. The newer updated one he is selling, I assume, is the same internals, just with a different housing, but Im unable to verify this.

First impression: comes packaged near identical to the tial: foam, box, even little ziplock bags with the top vacuum line fitting and some washers.

The red washers that came with these suck, they're plastic and tacky looking.

Disassembling, comes apart fine. Everything looks the same. Came with 2 22psi springs - sweet.

One of the two gates had some machining artifact near the valve seat. Went after it with a file for 1 min and cleaned up perfect. Again, near the valve seat, the valve seat itself was without blemish.

Valve excursion is .9". I dont have a tial here to compare this with - send me a # and I'll update this.

I read quite a few posts with members complaining about the ebay diaphragm allegedly being total crap. Diaphragm measures .125" at the edge and seems just as well built as my old tial 38mm gate. I didnt measure my tial diaphragm (already sold); if someone wants to supply this #, I'll also update this.

My 38mm tial - I had trouble getting the 3 (as I remember) allen valve top that holds the diaphragm down off. This guy has 4 allen pins and they all threaded out out the aluminum top no problem - pulled off with some coercion and looks good.

Anyway, the car running is a few months off - Ill update this once I have some running/performance info with any problems that occur. Aside from those cheap/ricey plastic washers and a little bit of filing, I have zero complaints about the product.

Possible failures are the valve itself - I saw some youtube test comparing tial's valves with some ebay gate/valve showing failure @ temp X for time Y. My current opinion is something along that of the "synapse vs competitor BOV test" in which the competitor BOV was set up wrong to flutter then videoed by some synapse paid tester - i.e. unlikely either is a well controlled study. These race geared part manufacturers seem to exploit human tendencies that assume more $$ correlates with better products. I don't mind paying a bit extra for US manufactured goods, but these are extraordinarily vast differences.

1000mi update: pulled one of the gates off and the valve looked healthy: no stress cracks, odd heating patterns, etc... Diaphragm is in great shape.
The gates behave fine @ 20-38psi, boost levels are smooth and appropriate.
Upon disassembly, I tried a large tial spring - no dice, these are not interchangeable if you plan on swapping parts around.